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QEC TRANSMISSION DATA.
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TRANSMISSION SOURCE: THE MERIDIAN [ExSC451208]
ORIGIN COORDINATES [SOL-7781 NORM.]: (0.0000000, 0.0000000, 0.0000000)
TIMESTAMP [TRN-01 STD.]: 00:00:00:000
...
>>>[ERROR] PROCESSES CORRUPTED. ABORTING PROCESSES...
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BEGIN TRANSMISSION CONTENT.
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I've brought the console to the bridge so I no longer have to make the trip
to storage each time I wish to write a message, and I've hooked it up to the
ship's main computer. It seems, however, that the console itself is defective
for it has only correctly loaded the ship's designation from the system data,
nor can I access its message history; I shall have to ask QuarterMaster to
troubleshoot at some point. But anyway, the functionality of the QEC is not
the purpose of this message. 

Since I cannot access the console's previous message, I cannot go back and
read what I put in the last message. From what I do remember, it was, for the
most part, feverish, fearful rambling - justified, perhaps, given my state at
the time, but I do not wish to give the impression I am ... unbalanced. I am
feeling better now. The ordeal has left me drained of energy and my mind
remains muddled, and I still have the strangest dreams that sometimes bleed
into my waking hours but at the very least I am up and about. 


I am Captain [REDACTED] [REDACTED], commanding officer aboard The Meridian, 
an Extra-Solar Cruiser, which is property of the [REDACTED] company. What I
am about to divulge, in this message and in subsequent ones are classified
operational details, and to share them will be to invite reprisal, likely
assassination. But I will do so nonetheless, because I no longer have much 
belief in the success of this mission, and even less in our return, and I
feel that ensuring that they are not forgotten is the least I can do to
honor the dead of my crew. 

What our mission was not - is not - was a search for alien life. Nor was
it even a search for intelligent alien life. No, our overlords (and we
too, for I will not deny our part) were too vainglorious for that. What we
were sent to look for was hyper-intelligent life - not our equals out here
among the stars, but our betters. We thought that by finding such life and
interacting with and learning from it, we could cheat evolution, skip the
line, advance man-kind in the short span of the decades and centuries of
our voyage as far as it would go in hundred and thousands of millenia,
left to its own devices. 

We were given seven planets, chosen by some calculus of analysis and
criteria I will not pretend to understand. Most of our voyage was to be 
spent in Cryo-sleep; QuarterMaster would wake us when we arrived (in order
to preserve resources, and prevent catastrophic loss of the personnel,
QuarterMaster was instructed to wake only the members required by the
circumstances - for example, until we made contact with a life form
possessing of language, our linguist would not be woken. The rest of the
crew could be woken as needed. I, as the Captain, was to be woken at every
planet.)


Our first destination was a nonstarter. QuarterMaster woke only I and the
geologist, Dr. [REDACTED] [REDACTED], to verify the judgement. What was
displayed to us on the ship's holo-screen was ... Hell. Quite literally. The
surface of the planet was almost entirely a sea of lava; Here and there rose
volcano-bearing islands of jagged, reddish stone - most of the volcanoes were
active. The temperature of its atmosphere was so hot that even the unmanned
probes could not descend far enough to get a sample of the stone before
burning up. What we were expected to find there is beyond me, but we remained
in orbit for one full cycle of the planet to see if perhaps we would meet the
devils that populated this pandaemonium, before letting QuarterMaster put us
back to sleep and set us on the way to the next planet.




The next part of story, which will tell of our fateful encounter, will have
to wait. Writing as much as I have has already tired me, nor am I sure I am
ready to face what happened to us, let alone recount it. I don't even know
if anyone is reading this, or if all this amounts to is a ... screaming
into the void. But I tell myself that I must keep going, if only to keep
myself from going mad.



Signing off for now,

Cpt. [REDACTED]

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END TRANSMISSION.
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